Wrong Feast
poems by Rivka Clifton
In Rivka Clifton’s sophomore collection, Wrong Feast, the lyric image, in all its ambiguous potential, flexes the tensions between Capitalism’s mass-produced nightmares and the individually strange experiences of death, art, and queerness to depict a world both sumptuous and awry. In these poems, Clifton engages Charles Simic’s surrealist question: “How to think without recourse to abstractions, logic, and categorical postulates.” Clifton turns the sensory details in her poems until their most mundane aspects become uncanny–a fish becomes a purse, a dog’s head deified as it is impaled on a fence, a buzzing cellphone birthed into a crib . . . These are not poems of action and consequence but ones of call and response. Page after page, Wrong Feast models close attention. Clifton fully considers the ambiguities and the possibilities within her creations, and she challenges you to do the same.
These poems will not provide lessons or insights. They are not the prophecy garnered from entrails. They are the entrails
In Wrong Feast, Rivka Clifton offers us entire, unforgettable worlds—glorious coexistences of mystery and clarity—embodying the unsettling overlaps and interstices of encounter. It’s a profound pleasure to witness this poet’s imagination as it digs deep into the work it was so clearly meant to do, unfolding visions with a music so naturally and powerfully realized, the progressions seem to have emerged from the very helixes of language itself. It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book that made new for me, to this extent, the fundamental strangeness of existence; I am grateful to Wrong Feast for reminding me how attention opens us to astonishment: in a poem, in a life.
“Visitation,” one of the many contemporary fables in Rivka Clifton’s striking Wrong Feast, ends with a satyr disgorging “dozens of paper balls” that “came / out and blossomed into deposit slips when they hit the ground.” Clifton’s poems issue forth many such surprises and transformations: Matryoshka dolls quaking on a shelf, an alligator with a python’s head, a fish with dollars spilling from its gut, a man romping in a dog mask. The book’s surreal narratives unfold in gas station parking lots and fence-lined city streets and pulsating clubs, meditating on an urban world marked by capitalism, popular culture, mass production, and, of course, consumption. Wrong Feast is wryly and darkly humorous and also elegiac, its many eyes turned to societal cruelty, environmental decay, and to more particular and personal losses. “Too often the eye cannot make sense of what it sees,” “The Awkward Animal” tells us, but in these remarkable poems, Clifton helps us envision a way through our bewilderment.
Wrong Feast is a book situated in ethereal ecotones and liminal minglings. Where the erotic meets mortality, where the spirit meets the body, where one dream meets another–this is the landscape where these poems unfold. With exquisite lyricism, visceral imagery, and deep insight, Rivka Clifton crafts transformative poems of becoming that smoke and singe.
Book Details
Title: Wrong Feast
Author: Rivka Clifton
Publication Date: September 8, 2026
Trade Paperback
6 x 9 in.
80 pages
ISBN: 978-1-936097-72-2
$16.95
Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123
Available at your favorite local bookstore, on bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold.
